The foundation came first

It was about 2:30 in the morning and Chad Shaules was stuck. He was wedged into the corner of an attic in a house he and his wife, Kristin, were flipping. He was trying to stuff a length of wire down inside a wall and couldn’t move. Kristin was about five months pregnant with their first daughter, waiting somewhere below. Chad yelled down to her, “I’m done!”

By day, Chad was chasing a vice presidency and the version of success he and Kristin had always imagined for themselves. In the aftermath of the 2006–2008 crash, they were also flipping houses of their own. Chad and Kristin had been together since they were 15. They were high school sweethearts who had become business partners. “Every step I would take, what my expectation was of the American dream, it just fell short,” he says.

A ladder to nowhere

Chad calls that night in the attic “an adult temper tantrum moment,” but underneath it was something more specific than exhaustion. They were . They wanted to change the world around them, not just get by in it. “One of the most important things to Kristin and I is world change,” Chad says. “That’s our core value as a company. It’s our core value for us as a family.”

The higher he rose at his company, the more that value seemed to be in someone else’s hands. “If world change, as we define it, didn’t align with the corporation’s values, then often we would have to give in to the corporation’s values,” he says. The night in the attic forced the question they’d been circling: Keep climbing a ladder that wasn’t satisfying, or build something of their own?

They incorporated Cornerstone Development Company on August 11, 2017.

If you don’t have a good foundation

One of the first decisions Chad and Kristin made as business owners was about accounting software, and they didn’t take it lightly. “We were debating between QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, and two or three other softwares, and we extensively researched them,” Chad says. He knew the decisions they made early could shape what came next. “Whatever habits you take into something, whatever tools you take into something, that is the foundation of what you’re building on. And as a contractor, a foundation means a lot, because if you don’t have a good foundation, everything’s going to fall apart.”

At the time, QuickBooks Online was the newer, thinner option next to QuickBooks Desktop. “Desktop had everything you could ever imagine, and then there was Online, that was like the runt child that somebody wanted to make something of,” Chad says. “But we just kind of knew that this was the future.” They chose QuickBooks Online anyway, betting on where the product was headed rather than where it already was.

As Cornerstone grew, its accounting setup grew with it, from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Online Advanced and eventually to Intuit Enterprise Suite. What kept them moving forward wasn’t any single feature. It was seeing the things they asked for actually get built. “Intuit is wildly passionate about customer success, and they’re wildly passionate about improving features based on real feedback,” Chad says.

When Intuit’s sales team first walked them through Intuit Enterprise Suite, a few capabilities Chad needed weren’t built yet. Rather than talk around the gaps, the team told him when those capabilities were coming. “They said, Chad, we can assure you that’s on the roadmap … Here’s the plan, here’s where we’re going,” he says. “That really struck Kristin and me differently, because we have not worked with many people, especially larger companies, that are willing to disclose to their customer base what they’re doing and where they’re going.”

That kind of trust compounds. Every Friday, Cornerstone processes six figures in payroll. Chad describes hitting the button as one of the more stressful parts of running the business. Real people are depending on that money landing in their accounts. “We rely on our trust with QuickBooks that when I hit pay on the payroll button, I can depend on Intuit that that money’s going to be in their bank account tomorrow,” he says. “I don’t have to worry about that.”

Constructing something less chaotic

Construction accounting gets complicated fast. “The types of accounting that we perform for construction are just awful,” he says. “Depending on what we’re doing, it can even be within the same account, within the same industry, and be three different types of GAAP-compliant accounting.” 

Construction project management and accounting are nearly impossible to separate, yet most software splits them across two different tools. “When you attempt to break apart construction project management and construction accounting, you create unneeded entries, you create additional payroll costs, you create a wild amount of room for additional error, and ultimately, you hurt your bottom line,” Chad says. Without the two connected in real time, forecasting a project’s margin became a guess dressed up as a plan.

Cornerstone had also outgrown its own org chart. What started in 2017 as one corporation with one tax ID had grown into five entities. There’s the parent company, three operating subsidiaries in construction, consulting, and utility engineering, and a fifth company that holds assets. “Cornerstone Development Company is quite a mixed bag of tricks,” Chad says. Each subsidiary has different accounting and payroll needs, and for years, seeing the entire business clearly meant manually reconciling all of it by hand, a process Chad calls expensive, time-consuming, and full of room for error. 

With Intuit Enterprise Suite, Chad can now see the five entities together in a few steps. “Boom, everything’s consolidated, ready for my review,” he says.

Business at the dining room table

Part of what makes Cornerstone work is that Chad and Kristin don’t think alike. “Most entrepreneurs either fall to one side of the spectrum. You’re either way overprepared and scared to make a decision, or you’re just reckless and you make decisions and hope they work,” Chad says. “Thankfully, Kristin and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum, so we create a balance in one another.”

Big decisions get made at the family dining room table. “Our kids are intricately ingrained in everything we do,” Chad says. “We do life, we do business, we do everything as a family.” It was at that same table, looking back on the years behind them, that Chad and Kristin finally put words to something they’d quietly known. They had built a real business through one of the hardest economic stretches in 25 years.

More windshield, less rearview

Today, Cornerstone spans five companies and about 50 full-time employees, with the team growing to as many as 75 when work picks up. None of that was on the map when Chad and Kristin started. “This place we are today was not a milestone on our map,” he says. “We made it. We survived. And not only did we survive, but we thrived.”

Chad borrows a metaphor from one of his mentors to describe how he thinks about the business now. “You should always drive your business like you drive your car. You spend most of your time looking out the windshield and only a little bit of time looking out the rearview mirror,” he says. “What is profound about the multi-entity view is it allows us to do both in an instant.” What that visibility ultimately gives him, Chad says, is peace.

That same instinct now extends to how Cornerstone uses AI inside Intuit Enterprise Suite. It recently flagged a project whose profit margin had fallen well below what the team expected. Chad and his team looked into it and found that the project was an outlier the system hadn’t accounted for. The recommendation didn’t fit. He doesn’t see that as a failure of the tool. He sees it as something the system still needs to learn. “AI is not going to run your business for you,” Chad says, “but those insights can give you a ton of information.” For Chad, the value is in the insight even when the answer isn’t right.

His advice to other business owners facing the kind of complexity he once did is simple. “You have to understand your business to run your business. If you don’t understand your business, you are flying blind.”